Adsorption installations are provided for many purposes and generally comprise an upright cylindrical vessel or housing receiving a columnar body of an adsorbent such as a molecular sieve or activated carbon, in one or more layers, the adsorption device may be used for the filtering of air, e.g. to recover solvent from a chamber in which lacquer is applied, in the treatment of gases of a metal degreasing installation, and for recovering dry-cleaning or textile-treating solvents from the air emerging from a treatment (dry-cleaning) vessel or a drying installation. In the latter case, the solvent is usually a chlorinated and/or fluorinated hydrocarbon and the adsorption device or adsorber contains a cartridge-like charge of the adsorbent material which may be regenerated by treatment with steam or other gas at an elevated temperature.
The housing generally has domed ends and is provided at its end walls with fittings for admitting the gas to be treated, the regenerating medium, etc., so that the assembly occupies considerable space and is not capable of expansion to accommodate increases in the quantity of gas to be treated. In such systems, therefore, it is usually required to provide an entirely new adsorber assembly with all of the aforementioned fittings and to connect it by complex piping arrangements, in parallel, with the original adsorber. Most frequently, however, it is not even possibble to include an additional adsorber unit in existing installations because of the spacial requirements of the original unit.